[Mesa-dev] GL4.5 or bust...

[Kenneth Graunke]

On Monday, May 16, 2016 6:32:11 AM PDT Dave Airlie wrote:
> So I said this on irc over the weekend and it seemed like we had some
> consensus on holding off 12.0 until we could announce 4.5 on some
> hardware. This assumes the FP64 stuff is going in at least.
> 
> So I decided to roll out the proposal here, which is that we finish
> GL4.5 features off for at least Skylake I think.

Personally, I think it makes the most sense to proceed with the
time-based release as planned.  We've already packed a ton of great
things into it...i965 will jump from 3.3 to 4.2, and the other drivers
have made significant strides as well.  I'd like to have an i965 GL 4.x
release sooner rather than later.

I might be inclined to push it back a week or so if that would help us
land SIMD32 (only for compute, and only when required).  Then i965/Gen8+
could enable ARB_compute_shader and claim 4.3.  Supposedly Curro has most
of that code written, and Jason's offered to review it as soon as possible.
A lot of applications seem to rely on GL 4.3 and compute shaders.

I'm all for rushing to GL 4.5, but why not do it in master after the
branch point?  We can always pull in the next release if we want, rather
than pushing this one out.  Looking ahead...we've got a bunch going on:

- Finishing GL 4.5
- Finishing ES 3.2
- Landing Tim's shader cache
- More performance work
- Porting features to more platforms (i.e. fp64 on Haswell/Ivybridge)

I think we could knock out a bunch of that out in another 3 months, and
it'd make for a pretty great 12.1 release.  I also think that varying
packing is going to continue to bite us, and feel like we're going to
have to rewrite that in order to have a good quality 4.4
implementation...

That's just my current thinking, anyway.  I'm not sure what's best.

--Ken
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